By Melissa Campanelli, Editor-in-Chief, eM+C Magazine
April 10, 2008
Google is 15 times as sensitive to technical issues as Yahoo!, and twice as sensitive compared to MSN.
This was a key finding from a seven-month study by Covario, an interactive marketing analytics firm formerly known as SEMDirector. The study, which took place between March 1 and Oct. 15, 2007, analyzed data from 300 major brands to look at the impact of various organic search factors on changes in rank.
Covario said there are three main components of a Web site on which organic advertising rankings are based: technical factors (such as tags and URLs), content on the site and context in which the site is viewed by the engines (largely determined by links to the site).
The study estimated that Google, Yahoo! and MSN react very differently to SEO techniques in these three areas. For example, besides the Google statistic mentioned above, the study also found that Google is 50 percent more sensitive to link strategy than MSN and approximately 25 percent less sensitive to content issues than the other engines.
Findings also showed that having key terms in specific strategic locations on a Web site or page made a large difference in rank performance. In addition, while there is no correlation between the number of links to a Web site or page, there is a high correlation between the quality of links and rank, the study found.
The study was performed via Covario's Organic Search Insight solution on 300 large-brand Web sites belonging to 25 large advertisers, most of which are Fortune 500 companies. The automated software crawled each of the major brand sites two times per month, performing 46 checks on each page on the site.
